BarcelonaTuesdays were the most anticipated days for Joan Laporta’s candidacy. It was the day that all the data and surveys that were done periodically were monitored. And every Tuesday the meeting ended with a good aftertaste, because the numbers were always positive for their interests. The election was extraordinarily long, with a pre-campaign that lasted two months and a vote that was postponed due to the pandemic. Laporta was the big favorite, but he watched as another candidate, Víctor Font, approached him day after day, who would end up being his main opponent. The nerves took over the whole team until, on the last Tuesday before going to the polls, the numbers gave them the winners, with more than 50% of the vote. The polls did not fail on D-Day, Sunday, March 7, 2021. Just a year ago.
In the retinas of many Barça fans, there is the feeling that Laporta won with one hand on his cheek. That he was the big favorite and that no one had anything to do. But the election result cannot be understood without the pandemic or, of course, the 2-8 against Bayern Munich in the fateful Champions League qualifier in Lisbon. Without that, Laporta would hardly sit in the main chair of the Camp Nou box office today. He would possibly be a person closer to Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, the last two presidents of the club (2010-2020). Let’s go.
Bartholomew was looking for a continuist option
It is necessary to go back at least until 2018 to find the first movements in electoral terms. Bartomeu, winner in 2015, could not run again because his second term expired in 2021 – he was president since January 2014, following Rosell’s resignation. At a board meeting he asked managers if anyone had aspirations. Only Jordi Cardoner raised his hand. But after some internal discussions, the vice president first resigned to run. Some time later, in 2019, the figure of Emili Rousaud, a member of the board, appeared and had joined the team shortly before the 2015 elections after meeting Bartomeu at a business dinner. Rousaud, until then a low-profile manager, was promoted to vice president and was Bartomeu’s dolphin until he resigned following the Barçagate case. But this businessman, founder of Factor Energia, and who would later run on his own, never finished weighing on Sandro Rosell, the person who always moved the strings in the shadows. Nor would it convince the candidacy of Xavi Vilajoana, who ended up being the manager responsible for training football.
Rosell and Bartomeu, who among other issues were accused in the Neymar case, pending trial, did not want to cede the club – with the permission of the members – to people they did not trust. That’s why they already had an alternative in mind. Before the pandemic, they believed that neither Font nor Laporta would be serious opponents, one as inexperienced and the other as amortized. At least that’s what his polls said. However, these polls also showed that a significant part of the members had become addicted to bartorosellismo. At this point, they thought that an alternative route, external to the board but close to them, could be a candidate option to win. Especially with a good popularity campaign. This is where the name of Jordi Roche, former president of Girona and the Catalan Football Federation, appears. Rosell persuaded him and Roche spent two years preparing for the election. He was not the only one who was polled, but he did go further. So far, everything was ready to make his candidacy official during 2020 … until covid-19 arrived, revenues plummeted and a financial crisis began at Barça that still lasts today. Roche saw the wolf’s ears and braked hard. Eventually, he decided to retire so as not to endanger his personal assets. A possible alternative, that of Juan Rosell, former president of the CEOE, did not come to fruition either.
The beginning of a pre-campaign that became eternal
Popular pressure following the motion of censure brought down Bartomeu and his board, who would resign en masse on October 27, 2020, eight months before the end of his term. That day the pre-campaign officially began, which already had some presidential candidates, such as Font and Lluís Fernández Alà. Then Toni Freixa, Agustí Benedito, Emili Rousaud, Xavi Vilajoana, Jordi Farré, Pere Riera and, lastly, Joan Laporta would be added. What would be the winner waited until the end, but it was that he had all the aces up his sleeve to achieve victory: the memory of his first stage, which ended with a sextet, and which represented the complete opposite of the two presidents. which they had commanded in the last decade. With a strategy designed exclusively to avoid making mistakes, he pulled his head out at the end, to save himself the previous fights. And when he appeared he deployed all the artillery.
Many people accused Laporta of not having prepared a sufficiently defined project to preside over Barça, or of not having presented any names (signings, coaches …) during the campaign. And, as they admit from the winning side, there was none in name. But one thing is the government project and another is the strategy to win. A point, the latter, at which Laporta had done his homework. And extraordinarily well done.
The current president was very disappointed in 2015, when he lost to Bartomeu. He didn’t want it to happen again. Since that date he had been meeting regularly with his hard core, and he was making a team that would see the light on November 30, 2020. They did not want to leave anything to chance, starting with a key figure like that of the campaign director, the publicist Lluís Carrasco, whom they had already signed before the summer, before Bartomeu folded. The initial budget was very high, at 1.8 million, and would be expanded later. Workouts were conducted to simulate interviews, thinking about compromised questions, and looking for the best possible answers. They asked Laporta to be strict in order to avoid the slingshots that could be used against him. They occupied as much advertising space as possible and a spectacular marketing action was designed, with the canvas unfurled at the Bernabéu, as a major attraction of the campaign.
Everything was calculated to the millimeter and the plan was executed to perfection until the board postponed the elections and passed them from January 24 to March 7. The collection of renegades heard at the Laporta campaign headquarters is unreproducible. The big problem was that while Laporta had hit rock bottom, rivals were gaining a few weeks to continue to grow in voting intention. And they grew, and a lot. Especially Font. Laporta criticized the manager, chaired by Carles Tusquets, because even before that electoral postponement he had already delayed the holding of the elections – setting them for the end of January, when they could have been held before Christmas. But Tusquets, an old cat, always used the pandemic and the security recommendations that came from the Procicat as an excuse.
Toni Freixa’s surprise with the signatures
By mid-January, at the time of the postponement, there were only three candidates left. The rest had not passed the signature cut. In addition to Laporta i Font, the third candidate was Toni Freixa. His name surprised, especially the Font team, which had projected, based on a survey, the number of signatures that could be collected by each presidential candidate. Laporta could have about 20,000, but it stayed at 9,625, half of it, basically because with the restrictions it was more difficult to collect the supports. Font had a ceiling of 10,000 and also got half of it, 4,431. Freixa, on the other hand, could get a thousand, according to these estimates, and collected 2,634. In the elections, Laporta tripled the votes (30,184), Font quadrupled them (16,679) and Freixa did not double them (4,769).
Rivals never considered Freixa a candidate with a chance of winning. And from the environment of the former secretary of the board of Rosell recognize that he had no choice, and that the real goal was to make noise to end up being integrated into a winning candidacy. But it passed the cut and became the only benchmark of continuism. They shared very little with Font. However, Font was annoyed by his presence because it prevented him from having a face-to-face meeting with Laporta. Laporta, on the other hand, was doing well in the three-way match.
The notoriety index
The key was in the notoriety index (IN), which is used to calculate the degree of knowledge that people – partners, in this case – have about a particular person. Laporta had a 97% IN from day one. It ended with 98%. On the other hand, at the beginning of the campaign, Font went through 50% haircuts. In other words, half of those who voted did not know who he was or what his face was. On election day that percentage had skyrocketed to 90%. Font’s team maintains that if they had a little more time, they would have turned the corner and won the election. And from Laporta’s team, although they say that they would have won the same, they do admit that they would not have had enough of the strategy that had been planned half a year before.
They changed the rules of the game. It was voted on later and voting by mail was introduced for the first time. The suspicions ended when official results confirmed what the polls had predicted. Laporta, disciplined and cautious throughout the electoral process, always faithful to the script, could be carried away by the euphoria when the polling stations closed. What was not expected, neither he nor anyone else, is that after that he would have to run a second marathon to get the endorsements and be able to be sworn in as president. He got it on the last day and in the morning, after a resounding resignation and last minute signings. But that’s another story.
